Monday, December 25, 2017

How I Spent Christmas Eve

It is now officially Christmas and I am wide awake at 2:30 AM. This is mainly because:

1. My daughter is with her father for Christmas this year. Believe me, I would never be awake at this time if my girl was snuggled up in bed. She gets up early on vacation.

2. I fell asleep around 10 while reading and now I am wide awake four hours later.

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I put Christmas Eve to good use and did some bookshelf organizing.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Now I know most people will not notice much of a difference, except physically you can tell that books have been moved around when comparing one photo to the other. But to me it makes a world of difference!

One of the reasons for my total lack of completion of the presidential reading goal is literally because the books got buried underneath a ton of other books and were way down on the bottom shelves. I took this chance to not only move all the books around, but to organize them a bit better. At first they were basically all shoved willy-nilly, wherever there was room. It was kind of aggravating to this OCD/Type A personality that I let it get so bad. Now though, it is so much better.

The first shelf is reserved for books that I have read and want to keep. All other books going in my book bag to be sold at Half-Price Books for less than a fraction of their worth.

The second shelf is for books pertaining to my president goal. They are now front and center and I can see what I have to work with. There will be no excuses in 2018. I can not ignore them. The rest of the shelf is spill-over from the one below, containing my Amberley treasures.

The third shelf contains many Christian history and non-fiction books that I am stoked to read. I am absolutely in love with a nearby Christian store, Divine Truth. The book selection is top-notch and I never walk out with fewer than five books. The shelf also contains more Amberley treasures. At first I thought they would all fit on this shelf, thus saving room for me to add to my president shelf. Clearly I underestimated just how many books I have purchased from Amberley since August. Oops.

The fourth and fifth shelves are a bit more loosely arranged, though I tried to keep all the like-topic books together. The Tudor and Plantagenet books are all together, books about space travel, plagues, random US history, pirates, the Mafia, Prohibition, adult beverages, etc are all there.

Do you ever arrange and rearrange your shelves or do you just cram them into whatever space you can find?

4 comments:

Oh man don't mention my shelves! They are a total mess and overflowing right now! I took some photos for an upcoming post and it's a horror show! I used to rearrange my shelves for fun but now it's an ordeal and needs to be sorted next year!

I love seeing how other people organize their books. This shelf was never intended to even be so full - when I first got, it was mostly filled with books that I had gotten from Half-Price Books, of which most I intended to sell back when done (mainly the president-related books). But then I started accumulating more and more and last night it was simply begging to be organized. Good luck with your own shelves, I look forward to that post!

Periodically, I will move books around if a given area needs more or less space. I have a few concentrated areas:- my Asimov collection- science- Star Trek- Asian and Middle East history- European history, language, and culture- religion and philosophy- "civic awareness", which is a catchall for books on urbanism, infrastructure, microhistories, that sort of thing

The rest is fairly mixed. I know what you mean about losing books amid other books...I actually lost a Christmas present -- a wrapped one -- because my TBR pile ate it.It was in the middle of a stack, covered on all sides by un-read books!

Definitely sounds like something that would happen to me - all those president books were completely overwhelmed by the huge influx of my Amberley orders.

I like the organization, though I will say I have zero Star Trek or Asimov texts among my books. My only fiction title right now is 'Go Set a Watchman' and I can't actually bring myself to read it because I love To Kill a Mockingbird more than anything and I can't watch Atticus become someone else.

Now having gone through and looked at each book one by one again, I can remind myself what I have - though most have made it to my Goodreads to-read list. I also found that I had a few doubles, ones I bought for the Kindle, and physical copies. Oops!